Getting into the Act: Women Playwrights in London, 1776-1829 (review)

Ellen Donkin pursues a subtle first-person exploration that carries her reader along; probing, analytical questions lead to insights about eighteenth-century theatre personalities and practices, as well as the cultural mandates of the era which made it difficult for middle-class women to work in the theatre. Citing prefaces and epilogues to plays, entries in journals, and letters of theatrical and literary figures, she examines situations from various angles before drawing conclusions, wondering “at what point actresses writing plays crossed a certain line and became playwrights” (30).

As she delves into seven individual stories, Donkin invites the reader to question and wonder along with her. This personal style helps in digesting a considerable amount of documentation on theatrical practices and contributes to an understanding of what it must have been like for a woman playwright during a time when prescriptive “social conduct required her explicit compliance with male authority” (184). Only three of the seven women discussed in this book qualify as “long-term survivors” (Hannah Cowley, Elizabeth Inchbald, and Frances Brooke), but the experience of the others (Hannah More, Sophia Lee, Joanna Baillie, and Frances Burney) illustrates sometimes disturbing aspects of the playmaking process and the hazards the profession held for women.

In her introductory chapter, Donkin states that she is “irresistibly compelled by how these women operated in their prefaces, their rehearsals, and their dealings with managers to create pressure for a voice and a presence in their culture, a subject position, the power to represent self” (28). This focus remains consistent throughout, even when the temptation might prove strong to load the narrative with biographical detail on her subjects. One exception where more personal material is provided is in the case of Frances Burney, whose father and brother both played instrumental roles in suppressing her writing for the stage in order to protect her from the “dangerous” world of the theatre; not until she was in her late forties did Burney finally defy her father, although this stand of independence came too late for her playwriting career.

A secondary but integral emphasis regards the managers of the period to whom the women playwrights submitted their work. David Garrick, who managed the Drury Lane Theatre between 1747 and 1776, stands as one who “redefined theatre management” and who, according to Donkin, ran a “conspicuously clean shop” (25–26) in terms of moral respectability. Although the women he assisted were a relatively select few, Garrick took pride in helping female playwrights. Donkin connects the first three women—Frances Brooke, Hannah Cowley, and Hannah More—to Garrick in both negative (Brooke) and positive ways (Cowley and More). Garrick contributed significantly to an overall tentative acceptance of the woman playwright; his retirement from management left no immediate successor to fill his fatherly, mentoring role.

Of the seven subjects in this book, the most successful was Elizabeth Inchbald, one of the most prolific and produced playwrights of her time. Unlike most women dramatists, Inchbald avoided many of the pitfalls of the profession by being an actress and having access to managers and on-site training in playwriting; as an insider, she was able to bypass the mentor, creating “professional access for herself” (114). Rather than becoming beholden to one manager for the production of her plays, Inchbald, as Donkin shows, deftly played George Colman of the Haymarket Theatre and Thomas Harris of Covent Garden against one another.

Writing in general was becoming more socially acceptable as a profession for women during this period, and all of the dramatists in Getting into the Act wrote in other forms, primarily novels and poetry. For those feminine writers who undertook the public venue of playwriting, however, ideals of eighteenth-century womanliness served as poor preparation for the “adversarial positioning” between playwright and manager and the “arena of business deals, name-calling, and artistic wrangling” (91). Some of the difficulties and hazards of...